Oracle Announces 8.5 TB Tape Drive, Adds Drag & Drop

Oracle introduced an upgrade to its tape drive line: the new StorageTek T10000D lifts the native capacity of the T10000C model from 5.5 TB to 8.5 TB while increasing the compressed data throughput from 360 to 800 MBps and maintaining the maximum native data transfer rate of 252 MBps. The new drive enables organizations to scale their data archive to more than 68 BE under a single point of management, Oracle said.

The new drive is compatible with the C, B, and A predecessors, but introduces support for 16 Gb/s Fibre Channel and 10 Gb/s Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). According to Oracle, the T10000D will sustain more than 150,000 drive loads and unloads and delivers an archive life of more than 30 years. The power consumption of the drive is 90 watts on average during operation, and 36 watts when hibernating.

There was no information on pricing and availability.

In addition to the drive itself, Oracle also announced the Library Edition of the StorageTek Linear Tape File System, which is designed to simplify the usage of StorageTek devices by introducing a drag-and-drop capability for files. Customers can now move files between tape and disk storage systems without additional archive or backup management software and take advantage of an NAS-like file structure that provides search and index capabilities.

The new file format caters especially to the film industry with support for 2K, 4K, and 8K digital formats. Oracle claims that its tape drive technology is 26 times more cost-efficient in storing such data than solid state or HDD-based environments.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.